August 31, 2012

Records are made to be broken, and a bunch of students at the University of Maryland are smashing the ones they just set earlier this summer. They’re so close to winning the crazy-hard American Helicopter Society’s Igor I. Sikorsky Human-Powered Helicopter competition — watch an amazing eight-foot flight past the jump.
Henry Enerson, a freshman at UMD, is one of a handful of pilots taking turns furiously pedaling in the cockpit of the Gamera II, a human-powered quadcopter. The team has already met one major requirement of the Sikorsky Prize this week, hovering for 65 seconds. Now if they can hit one minute and get a little higher than 8 feet — to exactly 3 meters, or 9.8 feet — they’ll win the $250,000 32-year-old prize.
The team has been testing all week but had to take a break for a few hours today so the students could go to class. We’re following their progress and we’ll update here if they set any further records — meanwhile, watch Henry’s flight below.

August 31, 2012

I’m supposed to be on a holiday and should let this one slide, but it’s too much. I was expecting fake skeptics to remain mostly silent in face of the ice massacre up north, but apparently they acutely sense how big this blow is to the remaining shred of their credibility, and so they upped the ante of misleading and distorting stupidity. Anyone can see and judge the silliness of paid shrill Marc Morano, 5-sentence posts regurgitator/vomiter Steve Goddard and of course WUWT. But this Sunday Times article, written by well-known pseudo-journalist Jonathan Leake (search for his name on Deltoid) had a quote by presumed scientist John Christy that really got my hackles up:

Professor John Christy director of the Earth System Science Centre at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said the Arctic had indeed warmed, but there was also anecdotal and other evidence suggesting similar melts from 1938-43 and on other occasions.

“Climate change is a murky science”, he said. “To some it’s an easy answer to say it’s due to extra green house gasses. To the rest of us, separating natural variability from human impacts remains a wicked problem.”

Commenters over at Skeptical Science quickly took this nonsense apart. FirstFrankD:

Danske Meteorologiske Institut published a series of annual reports on arctic sea ice covering most years from 1893 to 1956. The link has one folder per year, with each containing individual pages (month identified by the trailing digit) and the whole annual report (about 5 meg each).

Just referring to August extent…

Its true that ice extent was lower in the 1930s than it had been in the preceding 30 years. In particular, 1938 saw a dramatic reduction from the previous years – it was probably 1.4 M km^2 below the then long term average and maybe 0.6 M km^2 below the already low years in the late 30’s (carefully measured using Eyeball, Mk I).

So, it is fair to say there were some big melts in the 30’s. But Christy’s false equivalence is an epic fail – “similar melts” is pretty nice weasel-wording for mine. 1.4 M km^2 below recent climatology? Considered like that, 1938 was like 2010, I guess.

But in absolute terms, August 1938 extent was much greater (4 M km^2?) than today. So any attempt to conflate the two is…well…I can[‘t think of an adjective suitable for polite company.

Taking the Kinnard graphic – the 1930’s “similar melt” is the second last dip on the graph, the first decline with modern observational data. This saw a return to “normal” after a peak that had seen the greatest extents in 500 years.

Compared to the current decline on Kinnard (even without “enhancement”)? Well, even on Sesame Street they could tell you when one of these things was not like the other…

August 30, 2012

In recent months we’ve seen a spate of assertions that peak oil is a worry of the past thanks to so-called “new technologies” that can tap massive amounts of previously inaccessible stores of “unconventional” oil. “Don’t worry, drive on,” we’re told.

We can fall for the oil industry hype and keep ourselves chained to a resource that’s depleting and comes with ever increasing economic and environmental costs, or we can recognize that the days of cheap and abundant oil (not to mention coal and natural gas) are over.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media and politicians on both sides of the aisle are parroting the hype, claiming — in Obama’s case — that unconventional oil can play a key role in an “all of the above” energy strategy and — in Romney’s — that increased production of tight oil and tar sands can make North America energy independent by the end of his second term.

August 30, 2012

As a commenter has pointed out, the sun is low enough now in the Arctic sky that insolation is no longer much of a factor in how much more ice melts. The primary driver at this point is residual heat that has been stored up over the summer, which will be considerable. The temp anomalies image above suggest there is a fair amount of warm water left.

August 30, 2012

And I know that’s a pretty heavy idea to lay on you on a Tuesday. (Laughter.) But it’s true. The decisions we make as a country on big issues like the economy and jobs and taxes and education and energy and war and climate change — all these decisions will directly affect your life in very personal ways. And I’ve got to say, this is something I’m acutely aware of when I make these decisions, because they’re decisions that are going to affect Malia and Sasha, my daughters, as well.

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Will this be a country that keeps moving away from foreign oil and towards renewable sources of energy like wind and solar and biofuels — (applause) — energy that makes our economy more secure, but also makes our planet more secure? (Applause.)

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Governor Romney wants to pass a new $5 trillion tax cut targeted towards the wealthiest Americans. That’s not going to cut our debt. Ignoring inequality doesn’t make it go away. Denying climate change won’t make it stop. These things won’t make for a brighter future. They won’t make your future stronger.